Computers, personal digital assistants, and imaging devices such as printers may be capable of accepting e-mail messages from an external network such as the Internet. The e-mail messages, including any attachments, are typically accepted and sometimes automatically printed by a receiving device. Accepting unwanted or other spam-type messages and printing them consumes the resources of the printer. One way to reduce such messages is to filter in-coming e-mails based on known addresses that send spam, by guessing keywords that may appear in the subject or body of the message, or other filter. These types of filtering techniques can still accept many unwanted messages since addresses and keywords are easily changed by a sender.
A new and useful method and system for authorizing messages is provided.